


The darker the night, the brighter the stars

by Bruteaous



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-14
Updated: 2016-02-14
Packaged: 2018-05-20 14:58:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6012889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bruteaous/pseuds/Bruteaous
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natalia Romanova is killed on one of her first missions for the Red Room in Eastern Europe, but death isn’t permanent. Her soul can’t rest. Three different choices, three different paths for Natalia's life to take.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The darker the night, the brighter the stars

**Author's Note:**

> Sort of an existential exploration of Natalia’s life because I just can’t help myself. Anyway, if you like it, leave a kudos or a comment or whatever on your way out if you are so inclined. If not, rock on anyway and completely ignore these ramblings of mine.

  1. **_Lost Soul_**



 

Babulya used to tell Natalia stories.

It was something different every night. Topics ranged from Ivan Tsarevich to Baba Yaga and legends about foul spirits who stole the souls of children as they slept, but Natalia’s favorite tales were about people who were hard to kill or were able to surmount death like Koschei the Deathless, a villain who couldn’t be killed by anyone so long as his soul was safe.

 

Natalia was very young then in what seems like so very long ago before the curtain rose on the main acts of her life and everything started, but she could still remember the rough worn tone of her Babulya’s voice in her head, even if she couldn’t remember the words anymore. The words had faded so deep into her memory as to have seeped into her very cells. She felt them sometimes almost like someone can see their shadow on the wall, but not see themselves, or the details that make them up, not really. Just outlines.

 

It was almost like another life, a prequel to the one Natalia had been reborn into when she’d been genetically modified and given a famous surname that belonged only to the dead so she could be sent around the world to do unspeakable and tragic things like a character in a play or a ghost. Sometimes she wondered if she even existed for real or if she was just a nightmare given breath, but not her own will.

 

Sometimes Natalia wondered, but she could never really be sure.

 

* * *

 

  1. **_The Deathless_**



****

The world spins around, fast and then begins to slow and Natalia can recognize some things again. There are trees and snow then the sound of a gunshot, a burning feeling in her chest, and suddenly she’s falling and all she can see is gray sky. The world shrinks, only encompassing this moment. The life she has lived is somewhere behind her in a place that Natalia can’t see and everything that might have come after remains suspended in the murky amniotic fluid that waits to give birth to whatever future our choices will eventually yield. And somewhere buried deep in the recesses of her mind, Natalia’s cells continue to hear long dead Babulya’s rusted voice.

 

_So it was that Koschei removed his soul and hid it inside of a needle…_

 

All Natalia can hear of the outside world is the sound of her own breathing as it begins to ebb and shallow.

 

_And then he skillfully hid that needle inside of an egg. The egg is hidden inside of a duck, inside of a hare, and locked away in a magical chest crafted of the strongest iron, the finest crystal._

Natalia doesn’t have the energy to think about how she’d failed in her mission to the Red Room and her duty to her country before she’d even earned the name Black Widow. Or about how she might one day find something in life that her younger self never would have thought was possible like peace, friendship, or acceptance from a people the Red Room had taught her to kill.

 

_And so it was that Koschei could not be killed like other men and he became Koschei the Deathless._

She took a deep breath, feeling the pain in her chest as she did and the warmth leave her body in a slow red stream the longer she lay there. There were so many possible ways her life could have turned out if she’d caught the sniper in the trees before he’d caught her, but Natalia was still new to this life, if it could even be called that, of an assassin and that had been her first and last mission. At least this time around.

 

Natalia couldn’t remember closing her eyes, but the edges of her vision grew dark just the same.

 

_But eventually even Koschei was defeated by brave Ivan Tsarevich, his soul was found, his body was burned, and we are reminded that no one can escape death not even an immortal. Now, it’s time to sleep. Spokojnoj nochi, my darling Natalia._

* * *

****

  1. **_Deterministic Chaos_**



 

That was it.

 

The grey sky, the snow, the trees, they all still existed, but Natalia couldn’t be counted among them anymore. There was just her body, this left over shell of the girl that she’d been and she was hovering somewhere above, seeing the world below her as if for the first time.

 

Snow coated everything: pine trees, fields where barley would grow in the spring, log houses with small windows to keep the chill of the Estonian winter out, and even beneath the one lone oak tree where the sniper who’d shot her now rose and began to scan his surroundings.

 

Natalia could see everything and she saw herself or rather what had been her. The body of her former 16 year old self that was beginning to freeze without the warmth of a youthful heart beating to circulate hot blood through her veins.

 

The lips and skin were beginning to tinge blue and the glassy blue-grey of her eyes that had the ability to match green, blue, or nearly hazel depending or whatever she was wearing, had glazed over already with a thin sheen of protective ice.

 

Natalia wanted to go back. She wanted to jump back into her body and run to the rendezvous point where she was supposed to meet Ivan, admit her failure, be punished, and return to the Red Room for corrective training.

 

She wanted to get back to her life.

 

Not because it was the best life.

 

Not because it was a good life even, but because it was what she had known since Babulya had died and she’d been taken from that orphanage in Volgograd for a higher purpose.

 

It was all she’d known and Natalia knew she could be good at that life. She knew she could become a Black Widow worthy of the title. She just needed a second chance. That was all.

 

She just needed to be able to go back and kill that sniper and then she could go home a success and gloat to Yelena and all of the others about how good she was. About how one day she would be great and Yelena would tease her back and threaten to show her up on her next mission.

 

That was how it would go or how it should have gone, but that wasn’t how it was.

 

Natalia couldn’t go back, but she was going to try to move forward. She dove through the icy air, plunging through the atmosphere, down, down, down, and into the human shell she’d left.

 

When Natalia opened her eyes and took in a gulping breath the sky was above her again—this time vibrant and blue—and she could hear the sound of far off footsteps running.

 

The sniper was jogging towards the waist high stone wall separating the field he was in from another when he felt the knife lodge itself into his back, right between his shoulder blades. The gun case dropped loosely from his grip and his body keeled face first into the snow in a lifeless heap.

 

Natalia limped over, holding a gloved hand over the left side of her chest where the gunshot wound was still oozing red. When she was close enough, she dropped down to her knees and reached for the combat knife. The blade was buried so deep in the massive man’s back, it took Natasha a few tries to pull it free with a wet sucking sound.

 

Wiping the knife clean on her sleeve and sinking it back into its sheath, Natalia stood and took in her surroundings again. The world looked different now that she was back on the ground. There were sounds of waxwings calling to one another and the wind blowing briskly over the snow and jostling tree branches. Natalia started walking back the way she came, following the trail of blood she’d left in the snow until she reached the place where she’d fallen.

 

Beside the empty indentation in the snow, there were pink letters that looked like they had been carved into the snow by a bloody fingertip.

 

CHECKMATE

 

Natalia read the words and cocked her head to the side in confusion. She hadn’t done that or at least she didn’t remember doing it. Maybe the sniper had, but she couldn’t imagine him getting that close to her without her noticing. Then she turned and in the bloody indentation in the snow lay her body, skin still blue, eyes still staring blankly up at the sky.

 

Natalia looked down at her chest, pulled the glove off of her hand, and touched the still open gunshot in her side. There was no pain, but her nearly transparent fingers did come back coated in a sheen of sticky red liquid. The sound of the birds and the wind faded around her and she was once again hearing voices, only none of them were familiar, none of them were people Natalia knew.

 

_You’re a monster!_

_Who are you?_

_Who do you want me to be?_

Then the head of the corpse turned toward Natalia and she found herself staring into her own glazed over eyes.

 

“Natasha,” it whispered. “That is what you would have called yourself if you had lived.”

 

* * *

 

  1. **_Untenable Choices_**



 

The sky is grey again. Natalia finds herself staring out of a high rise building in a city she has never visited. She’s a little older, dressed in a tight pantsuit with a logo she doesn’t recognize strapped to her shoulder. She can see a river and traffic below her and red double decker buses and a mass of humanity moving from one point in their lives to another using the sidewalk as a conduit to do that. It starts to rain and the mass of humanity stops, every individual opening up their own black umbrella in unison and then continuing on their way.

 

“Are you paying attention?”

 

Natalia turns around. For the first time she notices the man behind her and the large oval room. The floor is covered in blue and yellow granite tiles. There are windows covering the walls. The only thing that isn’t a window is a dry erase board and the man is standing in front of it. He’s wearing a lab coat, but his pants are Soviet military green with the red strip down the side ending in high black boots.

 

Natalia doesn’t recognize him, but she nods anyway. He smiles, brown eyes glinting and lips pulling back to reveal sharp white teeth as he points back to the dry erase board which is empty.

 

“One of the fundamental tragedies of human nature is the inability to choose, or in so choosing, to live with the choices that we’ve made without regret. As people we want things and once we have them, we don’t want them anymore, we want something new. A new life, a new job, new friends, another child, a new lover, a new purpose, a different place to call home. We can never settle. We can never seem to come to terms with our lives until we don’t have any other choice. Until the possibility of choosing is no longer available to us. Until life as we know it is coming to a close and our acceptance of the fact is irrelevant.”

 

The man paused, flipped the dry erase board over, and pointed at the opposite side which was just as blank as the first.

 

“Alternately,” he started again. “It is choice that gives human lives their own unique trajectories. There is a school of thought in quantum mechanics that at any given point, the choice a person makes will not only determine what that individual does in one life, but what another version of the same individual will do in another version of their own lives. There are limitless possibilities until a choice is made and then the evolution of trajectories emerge.”

 

Natalia looks back down at the busy street and sees a little girl with a white jacket and red hair staring directly up at her. Their eyes meet and even from so far away, Natalia is able to recognize the blue-grey eyes as her own and the jacket as one she’d worn a long time ago. And it comes back to her suddenly.

 

Walking with Babulya on their way to a market in Volgograd to get fish for a soup. Babulya letting go of her hand and the way Natalia had wandered away and then the sound of screeching tires and shouts and then Babulya laying on the ground and no one remembering what had happened. Then there were the men who’d come to the hospital to take her to the orphanage. One of them with sharp brown eyes and small white teeth.

 

“Are you paying attention?” The man asked her again, his deep voice cutting through her consciousness in a way she can’t explain.

 

Natalia looks up at him then back down at the street, but the little girl in the white coat is gone.

 

Natalia doesn’t answer.

 

* * *

 

  1. **_Tabula rasa_**



 

_Natalia, wake up._

 

Natalia shot up in bed, gasping for air like she’d been running a marathon. Her skin was slick with cold sweat and she shivered as she opened her eyes and tried to remember how she’d ended up where she was. She was in a large room, dark save for the sunlight seeping in through high barred windows. There were beds everywhere filled with still sleeping and stirring girls.

 

“Natalia.”

 

Natalia startled and jerked away from the side the voice came from. She turned and saw a blonde haired girl her age, disheveled and glaring at her.

 

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Yelena asked, eyeing the red head up and down like she should have known the answer. “You were crying in your sleep. You know what happened to the last girl Mother heard was crying in her sleep. Hurry and get up. You know the drill, first girls at breakfast get the best food and I am not eating rock hard bread for the second day in a row.”

 

Natalia rose and dressed quietly. She allowed herself to be dragged through the corridors by Yelena’s insistent grip on her arm. Somewhere in the blur of movement, she was handed a cup of black tea and a tin plate with brown bread, butter, and slices of cooked sausage.  Sometimes there was porridge too, but not today apparently. They sat at the end of a long table of which there were four in the large room. Guards walked up and down the isles in between, batons bent under their arms as they watched the girls eat.

 

Natalia stared down at her plate, pushing a piece of sausage across the metal surface and watching as the latent fingers of the fork cut a patch through dots of grease and butter that had melted and now swirled together, but remained somehow separate from one another at the same time.

 

The toe of a boot connected painfully with her shin and Natalia jumped suddenly. Yelena sat across from her glaring.

 

“What was that for?” Natalia asked a little louder than she’d intended, rubbing the spot on her leg where she was sure a bruise would be tomorrow.

 

The guard walking up the isle behind them stopped near Yelena’s shoulder and both girls looked up. He regarded them both skeptically, his grip tightening noticeably on the baton under his arm.  

 

“I bumped my knee against the table leg. I’m fine. She didn’t do anything,” Natalia found herself saying.

 

The guard watched them a little longer, then continued on his way down the aisle. Yelena let out the breath she’d been holding and leaned forward.

 

“What is going on with you?” Yelena asked in a hard whisper. “You’re acting odd.”

 

Natalia dropped her fork, losing her appetite for the rest of her breakfast and reached for her cup of tea.

 

“I don’t know,” She said before taking a sip.

 

“Well fix it. You know Mother doesn’t like it when we start acting strange.”

 

Natalia nodded. Yes, she knew that. “Mother” as the collective orphans who made up their program were always forced to call her, was a strict disciplinarian. She had patience for very little. Yelena pushed back from the bench and collected her empty plate and cup.

 

“I’m going to wash up before morning exercises.” The blonde said, fixing her chosen rival with an almost charming smile. “Don’t take too long to finish your food. You know it makes the guards nervous when we linger in one place.”

 

When the blonde was gone, Natalia gulped down the rest of her bitter tea and walked her plate over to the sinks where she solemnly waited in line to do her own dishes as was expected of all of them. While she’s waiting she begins to think. What if this wasn’t really her life? It did feel a little surreal at times.

 

Practicing exercises meant to increase their flexibility and core strength, while simultaneously being expected to kill each other in the practice ring if another girl showed any sign of weakness at all regardless of her age. In a country with a population of 150,000,000, one orphan’s life didn’t count for much and it wasn’t worth anything if the state couldn’t find value in it.

 

Natalia was determined to make herself invaluable, but so was Yelena. That was sure to cause trouble between them sometime soon.  

 

After all, only one of them could be the best and only the best could be invaluable.

 

* * *

 

  1. **_Butterfly effect_**



 

Natalia went back to the common room, gathered a towel, and went to the showers. She paused slightly when she got there to admire the clean white tiles lining the floor and wall. It was one of the few places a girl could be alone without guards watching their every move.  

 

When the red head arrived, there were very few girls milling about, most of them having washed briskly and moved onto the training room where Mother and the other instructors were no doubt already waiting.

 

Natalia shed her clothes quickly. She could hear water running from one of the showers against the wall and knew it was Yelena. Against her own advice, the blonde liked to linger in one of the few places she felt safe in the compound. Natalia couldn’t blame her.

 

Naked, she moved over to one of the free stalls a few down the row from Yelena. When the water came on it was immediately cold. Natalia shivered, but stood firmly under the spray until it warmed.

 

Under the water, Natalia can almost pretend that she’s somewhere else. Anywhere else and that her life is not this life. That she’s not a ward and weapon of the state. That she has a choice in who she is and how she lives. It’s a tempting dream for teenage Natalia to entertain, but ultimately it’s too dangerous to hang onto. Hope for something better, something different, that is what will get her killed, she knows.

 

She’s seen the distracted look on too many girls’ faces before they were thrown down by their opponents for the last time and the thing they all had in common was that they were too caught up in their own internal fantasies to see death coming for them.

 

The water obscures any and all possible sounds as it fills Natalia’s ears, the warmth being taken in and ingested by every cell in her body starving for some sort of comfort in this place where girls slept handcuffed to their beds and only the strong were given any sort of shelf-life by their superiors. Despite the heat of the water, Natalia felt the fine hairs on her arms and the back of her neck stand up and she grabbed the arm that stretched out towards her, pinning the owner up against the tile.

 

“You didn’t hear me coming,” Yelena grinned, a note of pride in her voice as she rolled her shoulders and calculated the chances she had of maneuvering out of Natalia’s tight hold on her arm at their current proximity.

 

“I didn’t need to,” Natalia whispered, twisting Yelena’s wrist tighter as she pulled it sharply up between the blonde’s shoulder blades. “Was this your master plan? Take out the competition when she’s wide open?”

 

“You’ve got me all wrong, Talia.” Yelena said, blue eyes glinting with something that made the redhead’s stomach jump uneasily. “I’m here for you. To help you. Choice is such a…a fickle thing, is it not?”

 

“What do you mean?” Natalia’s eyebrows arched and wove together in confusion.

 

“‘Power is given only to him who dares to stoop and take it ... one must have the courage to dare.’”  Yelena quoted.

 

Dostoyevsky was a hobby of Yelena’s, Natalia knew. The blonde had managed to keep her love of the written word secret from almost everyone, but she hadn’t been good enough to hide it from her closest rival.

 

Using Natasha’s confusion against her, Yelena flipped their positions and pushed Natalia against the wall, front to front, eye to eye, mouth to mouth. They were about the same height, similar builds, but they’d come from different parts of the country and the way they viewed the sum of their own lives couldn’t have been anymore different.

 

“I’ll either be dead by tomorrow and you’ll be Mother’s new protégée or you’ll be dead and I’ll have taken your place.” Yelena recites dully, like she’s recalling a list of locations one of their instructors had demanded she memorize. “Choices, choices, eh, Natalia? The question is what will you choose to do when the time comes?”

 

The blonde trailed the fingers of her free hand from the center of Natalia’s chest down to her navel, stopping to circle the edges of the other girl’s belly button with her fingertips so softly it made the red head take in a sharp breath.

 

“Mother won’t ask me to kill you.” Natalia lied, knowing that Mother might indeed ask that of her one day.

 

“She will.” Yelena countered, moving closer still so that they were breathing the same air and their eyes were staring into one another only inches apart. “You haven’t been acting yourself lately and any sign of weakness immediately puts your usefulness into question. I’ve always been every bit as good as you are, but you’re Mother’s obvious favorite. I know she’ll want to see you succeed. It was bound to happen at some point. You have the ability to kill me, but will you or…is there something stopping you?”

 

Natalia swallowed as she felt the hand she’d been restraining only moments before settle onto her naked hip, fingers sliding wetly over the pale skin of her lower back. The other hand migrated down from her belly button to stroke the inside of her inner thigh experimentally.

 

Natalia felt her cheeks heat up and a strange bolt of excitement thread through her insides as the hand that had been on her hip moved up to caress the side of her face and settle underneath her chin as blue eyes as smooth and treacherous as ice bore into her with an unusual sincerity.

 

Love or lust were obstacles the state expected their Black Widows to be able to surmount in favor of things like loyalty and duty. They were trained not to want and not to give into the desires that led most of humanity astray, but if there was anything Natalia was sure of in this moment, it was that she wasn’t perfect and neither was Yelena and in their shared failure to adhere to what was expected of them, they had finally found common ground.

 

An understanding that went beyond anything they were meant to experience. An intimacy that wasn’t physical, but bound them together in the moment just the same. It wasn’t about being orphans or assassins in training or even about being Russian, it was about being human.

 

Two girls. Two lives at a crossroads in time, feeling as if for the first time the connection of their shared humanity and how vulnerable it made them in the face of a dark indifferent world that didn’t care who or what they were or where they were headed.

 

Then Yelena leaned forward and pressed her lips to Natalia’s. It was a soft convergence of mouths so gentle as to be contrastingly foreign to all of the physical experiences that had made up the whole of Natalia’s sixteen years of life so far. They both stayed still for a few seconds as if unsure how to proceed then Natalia pushed forward tentatively.

 

Yelena allowed her to move closer, the blonde’s breath catching in her throat involuntarily as their bodies touched in a way that was far less violent than the landing of vicious kicks and punches that were the only forms of bodily contact they were permitted. After a few minutes that seemed to suspend themselves somewhere in space rather than in any sort of reality, Natalia pulled out of the kiss and Yelena took a step back, dropping her hands to her sides.

 

“You’ll have to choose.” Yelena said, a sort of regret in her eyes that hadn’t been present when they’d started this. “And so will I.”

**Author's Note:**

> Russian Phrases:
> 
> Babulya = Granny
> 
> Spokojnoj nochi = Good night


End file.
